Businesswoman takes chaos out of clutter

She's always been an organizer. She can't help it, categorizing things even in her mother's house.

"My mom used to joke, 'When you get your own kitchen, you can organize it however you want. Quit fixing mine."' McMahan said.

Now married and a mother of two with a home of her own, McMahan is fixing up more than just her own mess. She'll come tidy up yours, too.

Call her Amarillo's version of HGTV's "Mission Organization."

The former teacher turned stay-at-home mom operates a professional organizing services: Space Simplicity.

A member of the National Association of Professional Organizers, McMahan will tackle a child's bedroom, a hall closet, a kitchen cabinet or a garage. She'll organize your home, your office or your work-at-home office.

Her goal is to make space peaceful for its users.

Clients usually wait until the desperation stage to seek her help. One such client, Keri Campbell, was no exception.

"This room was chaos," said Campbell, referring to her daughter, Ryanne's bedroom. Campbell turned to McMahan to help organize her 4-year-old daughter's closet to shrink the clutter and improve accessibility for the increasingly independent toddler.

McMahan tackled the child's closet, which had been piled with toys. Clothing for Ryanne was out of reach, hanging on a standard-height rod.

"Ryanne's getting to the point where she wants to be able to dress herself, and Jennifer made it so she can adjust the shelving herself as she grows," Campbell said.

Space Simplicity

What: Professional organizing services

Call: 676-3662

On the Net: www.spacesimplicity.com

And with the addition of shelving as well as a reachable clothing rod for Ryanne, the youngster also can learn to put away her toys.

McMahan transformed a standard closet with a 7 foot clothing rod and shelf into a closet with 12 feet of hanging space and 20 feet of adjustable shelf space at varying heights. The transformation includes room for a set of wire baskets for toys that Ryanne can roll into her room and push back into the closet.

Campbell hopes to be saving herself time and frustration as well as building good organizing skills in her daughter starting at an early age.

A simplified organization design makes life easier.

McMahan does closet planning for homes and for businesses. She works in occupied spaces, like the Campbells', and in new homes and businesses.

Her business includes working in homes to do space planning, solving storage problems, designing pantry or utility storage or organizing garages.

At businesses, she does organizing coaching and space planning. She also handles filing systems, time management and goal setting.

People often try to get organized but find themselves more frustrated when their efforts fail.

For example, people should divide and categorize things before they go buy shelving or clear storage bins that they don't know what to do with.

To tackle a project on your own, McMahan advises people to empty the closet, the garage or whatever space, purge anything old, broken or out of style, get rid of things not used in the last few years and categorize and organize it in containers or shelves.

Simplifying is tough for most people, she said. They get so much stuff that they don't know where to start.

"Twenty percent of what we have is used 80 percent of the time," McMahan said.

Once people get rid of what they don't use or need, and organize what they do use, life flows more smoothly - at least when it comes to finding things. All that's left is maintenance so things don't get out of hand again.